Doomed to Fail - Ep 158: Frostbite and Forceps - Self Surgery in Antarctica

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

What do you do if you are in the coldest, most remote place on earth and you need to have surgery? You probably hope to hell that you brought a doctor along with you... but what if you ARE the doctor who was brought along? Today Farz tells us about Leonid Rogozov, who took out his own appendix! And Jerri Lin Nielsen, who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer deep in the Antarctic freeze! Very important homework assignment to watch X-Files S1 E8 - "Ice" literally as soon as you can.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Bam, Taylor, we are here live on the radio. Neither of those things are true. I mean, we're alive. That part is kind of true.

Sure. Sure. And I guess technically, if you listen to this, like, it's like a radio. So fine. Yeah. Yeah. It's totally, totally radio. How have you been? Let's let's whip up the banter. Let's do it. Well, first off, welcome. Oh, right. To Doom's to Fail, we are the podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures. And I'm Taylor, joined by Fars. Taylor, should I just record a proper intro from you that I then

Splice in at the very beginning so that No, because I think my inflection is different every time. Just kidding, who cares? Sure. Maybe the only way to streamline me for getting things like the intro, but anyways, how have you been? I have been, well, lots of Christmas-y stuff happening. Florence played the violin at the town.

Christmas tree lighting and there was snow in town the other day. They like brought in a box of ice and then like wood chip them. It made them into snow. And then they were able to, the kids were able to have snowball fights and do a little bit of like fake flooding. And it was very cute. I think your kids are having one of the most idyllic experiences of a child. Because like I can't imagine that if you're a kid growing up in like L.A.,

that's your lived experience is like I think you're just like in your cell phone and like doing I mean they watch plenty of TV but there is something about a small time that is cool for raising children TV's not like okay so unpopular opinion probably that's not bad thing actually like I don't think so either actually now now people's attention span is like seven second TikTok clips like it's probably good that your kids can focus on a 30

minute show or two hour movie you know what I mean I mean they know a ton about dinosaurs so I'm also a huge dinosaur fan are they really big of dinosaurs like both of them yeah for sure like they know a lot of stuff but they've been so many shows they like learn so much that it's like for real they learn about animals a ton about dinosaurs a ton about stuff just from certain cartoons that they like so it's good I got into um uh the Jurassic park animated series on Netflix oh gosh Camp Cretaceous yes I love How far are you? So I've only watched probably three episodes of it. God, it's so good.

But it's pretty good. Like, I know I'm not supposed to like it as an adult, but... You are. It's great. There are many seasons, and even the most recent season was great. There's even a season in the middle where it's one of those, like, you get to choose what to do Netflix shows. Oh, no way. And every once in a while, you get, like, eaten by a dinosaur, and you're like, damn it.

and you have to, like, go back and make different decisions. But it's great. No, Campertaceous is so good, like, legit good. Do you remember when we were kids in those books, like, choose your own adventures? Mm-hmm. Did you, well, you like me? I would, I would choose my original adventure, then I would go back and try the different versions of it. That's what you're supposed to do.

Okay. All right, so I already did that. Okay. Because you can't just, like, read it once. It's not the way it works. I don't really, like, go back to the beginning. I would go back to, like, one. Yeah, yeah.

You go back. to some inflection point um sweet well uh yeah i can go ahead and kick us off i believe i'm going first today so are you ready to be kicked off i'm ready i can't wait okay so today all right so i'm going to give a shout out so rachel was the

origination point for this idea but she just threw out like an idea and then i really honed and finested but it was her idea so I am going over. I'm going to cover surgeries. I'm going to cover two surgeries specifically that were done under the exact same circumstances, but they were remarkable circumstances because they took place in a very, very remote area of the world.

So our first story takes place in 1961 at the, God help me. Novo-Lazarev-Skaya station. That Russian? Yes. Great. Hey, there you go. I knew that was a Russian word. I'm trying.

Taylor, I don't know if you do this the way I do it. I'll read the name of the thing. And then I'll type it out phonetically on my computer. And I'll like space it out so that I don't get too confused looking at the big word at once. And then I'll like forget what I was thinking when I typed it phonetically. because like the actual phonetic type that they have like on Wikipedia where it's like far more

so concerned and it like says exactly how to pronounce your name I can't read that I don't know it's like hieroglyphics yeah there's like a dash and like it just doesn't mean any sense I'm like okay great so I'm gonna refer to this thing as a station because I literally exhausted every brain cell I had

just now trying to pronounce it so I'm pretty sure you told me that you took Russian in school also so here's the thing I can read and write Russian but I do not know what I'm reading or what I'm writing like the alphabet

I memorized but I don't know the words you could like pronounce it or no actually you know what if I saw no you know what it would be just as hard if I saw it written out in Russian it would still take me a minute I would know the Cyrillic alphabet

so I would know what the hieroglyphs sound like but it would still take me a minute to like actually read it out cool so great we're in russia so uh no we're not we're not um so this station with whose first name i'm not going to pronounce more we're going to go by its uh family name of station so this was a soviet and now a russian research station in antarctica so i learned a lot about the weather in antarctica because i think that like the obvious answer is that

it's like cold, but it's like a lot worse than cold. So it's actually technically a desert. Right, because there's no vegetation. No, because there's no precipitation. Oh. Yeah, there's no rain. There's no concept of rain

in Antarctica. And the winters there are interesting because they actually run like almost totally actually, actually yeah, it's completely inverse to our winters. The winners there are from March to September and that's obviously the worst

time to be there. It's always horrible to be there but that's the worst time to be there. That's when like the temperature drops, averages are in the negative 80 degrees range. And so at a station like this typically you have about 70 people that are at the station but then like

when winter's about to come a lot of those people leave and so you end up with this skeleton crew of in the case that I'm talking about here today about 14 people staying at the station and like I said like the the winter time experience um there's several things that are going on there that result in it being a really tough place to live one thing I learned that kind of shocked me was that the sea ice around the perimeter of Antarctica

freezes to such an extent that it doubles the size of the continent like that's how badly it gets cold there and so ships going it's impossible like a ship going it would take them months to be able to traverse this also blizzards are obviously very very common and that makes some visibility for things like air drops super difficult

but that's only if you're even able to get a plane in the area because there's a thing also known as a cat, okay, cat, catabitic wind, catapitic wind. So these are wind gusts that are exacerbated by gravity pulling the dense air down rapidly. And like I said, it will create gusts of wind that are equivalent to hurricane level. And so that makes flying in kind of impossible because you're not, because of the conditions, you can't fly in with like a traditional like jet airplane. it would be too cold especially so one thing i read was that a big problem here was that uh fuel lines

and hydraulic lines would constantly freeze on planes like before they would touch the ground and that's obviously like not a good thing so everyone's bad so in this case um we're going to be discussing a young 27 year old surgeon named leonad leonid uh regozov and he was at this station during April, which is the middle of the winter, when he started feeling nauseous, weak, and pains of his abdomen. Given that you have done research on this topic, what do you think he might have been experiencing? Oh, an appendix exploding.

Which is called the what? Burst appendix? Penicitis? Perid paris. Paritinitis. I definitely said that and I would never remember that. So, well, I'll have to figure out which episode that was. And y'all can go back and listen to the episode about appendicituses.

Appendicituses. Appendices. Appendixes. So anyway, he realized that he was experiencing these symptoms and the only cure for it, like we said, was an appendectomy. Unfortunately for him, Leonad was the only doctor at the station. realized that he was the most qualified person to perform his own surgery. So at 2 a.m. the next day, on May 1st, he started the surgery with the assistance of a driver for the facility and a meteorologist. The poor fucking meteorologist was like, I know, he's like, dude. Absolutely not. I'm used to. I'm all, I'm good with green screens.

I can do green screens all day long. I do not want to look at blood. So he ends up, he, he sets himself down. he lays half reclined and he starts cutting into his abdominal wall and actually he actually cuts too deep and cuts into what's called a sesum which is the starting point of our large intestine so in addition to everything else he now has to suture that up is he like drinking no he has novocaine he's using a local topical anesthetic on himself okay so after he fixes his small intestine cut with sutures he pulls out his appendix and cuts it off and then

sutures the end wound and then applies antibiotics to it and then it sutures up the abdominal wall and this is incredible because the assistance that he had do this for him also took pictures of him conducting the procedure can you look these up taylor yes wait how do i what do i what do i search. So do Leonid L-E-O-N-I-D surgery and you should find them. The man

who cut out his own appendix. Oh, good, all these images have the don't look at it, Mark. I'm going to do it anyway. Yeah, it's kind of, it's, because it's it's just, it's horrible. Oh, God. Is there wild?

What? He's wearing all weight and then it's just the and just like digging into his stomach and it's covered in blood wow so I described in this outline that the pictures

of him I would describe him as like unfaced and almost disinterested in the activity of pulling his guts out like he looks chill as shit with his like I know he's wearing a mask when he's doing it but other photos of him he's like

what's up he's just like has like a mustache like he looks like something and we know. Yeah. Yeah. No, he's like just, yeah,

I know exactly here you're talking about. Yeah. It looks like he's fishing around in his guts and it's just like, I guess I'm doing this now. I don't know what I'm going to be doing next week. Like the way that you look when you are recording this podcast from a bed where I know you are resting your laptop on your belly and then just like looking at me in a weird way. Like that's what he's doing.

Yeah. Like would you, would you say the description of him just like unfazed as accurate? Yeah, it's wild. So he ends up doing that. that so please look at that photo up because it's like absolutely stunning um and then two weeks after this he's back at work like he literally goes back to work and then he leaves the station when the winter break ends because when winter ends there is when they start flying um planes back

and ships start going back and people start doing rotational shifts and stuff like that he ends up going back to russia he becomes a um a published author in medical science and he actually ended up only being 60 years old, 66 years old when he died in 2000 from lung cancer because he's Russian and he probably spoke 50 cigarettes a minute. He was also probably smoking a cigarette while he was doing this. Like, I bet there was like a, the meteorologist was like hand to him a cigarette. He's like kind of a cool dude.

He seems really cool. Like he seems like if he met me, he wouldn't hang out with me. Like that's how cool it is. No, 100%. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for validating that Taylor. I'm saying same. He wouldn't hang out with us. He'd be like, I am busy.

So our second story is way more recent. And it's America-oriented because it takes place to the U.S. controlled a Muddson-Scott South Pole station. South Pole, obviously Antarctica, same situation. They're actually only like 14, not only. They're 1,400 miles apart from each other, these two stations. And a lot of countries have stations in Antarctica. It's a big thing. They do.

They're looking for, I don't know, man. It's not good. The thing. Yeah, they're looking for, like, the part of the core that holds, like, the secret to infinite energy and or a plague that will kill all of us and or an alien worm that will also kill all of us. I'm kind of okay with any of those outcomes, to be honest with you. I mean, I don't have kids, so, like, I don't really care what happens to the world. Like, that's fine. Find the plague released it.

It's okay. I'm going to be dead soon anyways. So a really fun fact about this station, there's a thing there called the 300 Club to our. fanatically Christian listeners, you might think the 300 club has to do with Billy Graham. It does not. The 300 club has to do

with humans who have experienced a 300 degree switch in temperature. And what you do when you're at this station and you got to plan this because it's kind of the temperature outside would be nuts. So basically what you do is you sit in a hot sauna set at 200 degrees for about 10 minutes and then you wait for the outside temperature.

to hit negative 100 degrees Fahrenheit. No. Which happens like not that. Like I said, the average temp is around negative 80 degrees. So you got to be like, it's got to be a, you got to plan for this.

When it hits negative 100, you run out of the sauna into the cold and you do a loop around. There's a bunch of flags that are planted outside of the station in a circle fashion and you do a loop around them. But it's interesting because you actually can't run

because you can't snort up a ton of air because there's moisture in the air and it will freeze your lungs and those will burst. Dude, I don't know how you don't die. You got to kind of shuffle. You get it kind of shuffle. They go out there naked except for shoes.

They do wear shoes, but you shuffle and then you like make your way back inside. But you can't go too slow because you'll die immediately of freezing. But you can't go too fast because then you'll destroy your lungs from breathing. too much. What? So that's a fun little thing.

It's a 300 club again. You're going from 200 to negative 100. Very few people seem to have done this. But it seems fun. I would do it. I would absolutely not do it. I don't even like a sauna when it's like a little hot. I'm certainly not going in like a super hot.

When you come, are you coming to Austin again anytime soon? No. Okay. If you do plan something, I got really into the sauna cold flunch thing. I don't do it. I don't do it regularly because it's super expensive. But for like a little bit, I got like into it when I was able to do it regularly.

And it kind of is amazing. Like you, you feel almost high doing it. So if you ever make it out here, we'll go do that. Okay. You sound so interested. Super not interested, but fine. It's weird because you're. bodies like it's so you're you go from one extreme discomfort to another extreme discomfort

and then you realize like what even is comfort is is everything comfort now like is is is is life just a living hell and everything you just got to adapt your brain to be comfortable with anything that's kind of like yeah yeah that's literally what it's like that's why i think that's why people get like hooked on it is because you're just like your body's shocked at like what it's having to survive oh my gosh so Back to this station. So in 1998, there was an emergency room doctor whose name was Jerry Nielsen, who took a one-year contract to be the main doctor at this station in 1998. So while she was there, she discovered a lump on her breast and was like, this is one where I'm like, it's got to suck being a doctor sometimes.

So you know how bad things are. Like you know what it looks like. Whereas like, if you don't know, you're like, eh, it'd be fun. but she found this lump on her breast and she used email and video conferencing with stateside doctors like what's going on she biopsyed her own breast she literally cut out tissue from herself to biopsy it and send the details of what she found back to stateside doctors via email and remote telehealth which was I'm sure amazing in 1998 yeah Wow. It's like, yeah, no. Yeah. Oh, he didn't work too good. But those doctors, they were like, we can't tell if this is cancerous or not. And so what they decided to do was to get her more supplies via airdrop. This was apparently a fucking nightmare because when they were trying to do this, there was a blizzard outside. So the plane, so it was too cold for the plane to land. And what they had to do is have some or people run outside and light trash cans on fire for the plane.

to know where to drop the sub because in the middle of blizzard you actually don't know where you where you're oriented underneath you you can't see lights and stuff and so they ended up letting these blazes for the plane to see i don't want to be someone that says antarctica is stupid but like that is stupid you are so anti the thing like i don't know what your deal is but you really don't want the plague to come back and i don't get it i've i know you haven't watched exiles but the best X-Files episode, this happens. You know, it's funny. I don't, I don't know for sure, but I feel like you and Jay, like, there's an element

of judgment every time you remind me that I didn't watch the X-Files. Oh, no, that's not, that's not imagined. You're not imagining that. No, that's true. I feel bad for you, and I'm judging you. Is it because you know, everything I watch, like, makes me the perfect X-Files fan, and I haven't done it. I watched it when I worked at a hedge fund like 20 years ago.

And I worked for like six years, but I was like sick of it by like year four. So I just watched X-Files on my computer. But I was like very clearly like in people, people could like see that I was doing it. And someone was like, I think Taylor's trying to get fired. And I was like, and they did not fire me.

I continued. But I watched all the X-Files. But is that why you all judge me so hard because I should be an X-Files fan? Yes. You absolutely should be. It's so good. Okay. Fair enough.

So anyways, back to Jerry Nielsen. So the airdrop was conducted on July 11th of 1998. With these new supplies, it was conclusively determined that she definitely had breast cancer. And so she is the only person in history to have applied chemotherapy to herself. Whoa. And having done so in Antarctica, the worst place to be alone with cancer. Wow. So this was, I mean, it was going as well as you could expect, but what they decided to do was, so I mentioned that the wintertime in Antarctica ends in September. October is when they decided, hey, we got to like get her out. Because like even October is like a little bit too close to winter to like really be comfortable with flying into Antarctica. But they still did it. They're like she needs to get out of there. Like she's been doing chemotherapy herself for a number of months. We got to get her back. They ended up running an emergency mission like several weeks early to bring.

bring her back and that's what they did they landed they picked her up they took her back and this was like really terrifying apparently for everybody involved because again if the hydraulic lines on a plane freeze like the wings coming off a plane are less of a big deal than your hydraulics not working like you are for sure dead like if hydraulics don't work and so that was the biggest concern of the situation regardless they were able to pick her up and take her back to the state where she was administered professional treatment and the cancer went into remission unfortunately for her

that only lasted a few years. So in 2005 the cancer actually came back and it was awful. It apparently went to her brain, her liver, and her bones. Like she got riddled with cancer and she died in March of 2009 but she spent that

time being a motivational speaker, writing a book and she got married again. And yeah, I think she had a She had a pretty decent life for what it was, but... Okay, I don't want to sound insane, but like, do anyone else there get cancer? Like, isn't it, isn't it like very, is it radioactive down there? Are you trying to X-Files this episode, right?

I am a little bit. Is the South Pole radioactive? Yeah. There's more cosmic... Oh, well, it says no, it's not radioactive, but the polls get more cosmic radiation than the equator. Are you on infowards.com? No. I'm the center for domestic preparedness.gov.

Cosmic radiation. Oh, good. This is we have to worry about? I don't need this. I don't need the center for domestic prep. No, absolutely not. But, yeah. Those were two fun surgery stories that I came up with.

And there was one, there was, I researched it a little bit. I was going to do an episode on. I was like, this is so stupid. I came to do an episode on it. There was a doctor in like the 1900s who became famous for cutting the heads off dogs to sew them on to other dogs and then reanimating the heads. like it actually worked and and I was like

I was actually talking to Rachel about it was like what's the scientific discovery like what are you trying what do you mean works as in he was able to reconnect the blood supply enough to where the dog was aware and awake but it was paralyzed

so it couldn't move anything but like it was like cognizant of what was going on whoa it's like what do you what did you learn like what are you gonna saw off a possum's head next is are you doing advanced medical science like yeah like you can't you're not like i don't know what's like if he could tell you something maybe but it was it was so sorry it wasn't the 1900s i'm thinking about a guy who cut monkeys heads off in the 1900s the dog guy was 1800s and apparently mary shelley knew about this and like it was like a thing in her time

and is believed to be the inspiration for Brangentzine as well well, I know, I don't think I feel like I didn't hear that but I know that she was, people were reanimating frogs with electricity, but just like making the move. It's called like gallantism, I think. Gallant something. Galantism.

Um. You're right. You're right. You know what? I go on timing off. The monkey decapitating reanimation guy that was like the 1950s

the early 1900s was the dog decapitation guy and then before that was the frog animation guy it's just like various versions of like

psychopas throughout history that like no wild so well cool those are gross stories yeah it's fun yeah i kind of want to go to that though i don't it's too cold for me like i don't want to be in a substation where there's like a finite amount of food

but isn't it fun knowing that death is like outside of a wall next your head no i don't know i feel like i go to sleep cozy knowing knowing that it's the same reason why i sleep so well when it's like really windy and rainy outside I sleep like a rock it's so cozy that's fair no I like it I like sleeping I like when there's a storm but I don't like it when it's like if my appendix explodes like I'm gonna die

I mean I don't know be that that guy the chillest coolest coolest doctor in the world man for some reason I feel like doctors I feel like Russians or Soviets in the 1960s were cool as shit when you look at pictures like Stalin when he was like 25 30 years old

like that guy that guy is like he would be a slam poet on a Wednesday and like a machine gunness on like a Friday like he could go to Austin in like two seconds and everybody would be like

it's like every he's like every extreme of cool that exists on the spectrum of cool like he he does I mean he also killed a lot of people but there's that one picture of him we're not promoting we're not promoting we're not promoting Stalin we're against

we're against the genocide we're against like genocides in general yeah and like not just the ones that Stalin did but I'm gonna add Hitler I do like I do like the pictures of FDR and Churchill and Stalin

where they're like like what are they even talking about I love it it's cool as shit it's like hey is it awesome we rule the world it's cool well cool well cool fun that was super fun so that is my

story. Taylor, do you have anything to lead us off with? We got a bunch of responses about Niagara Falls. A lot of people have been there. Our friend Morgan has been everywhere, I mean, honestly. But she had sent me a video of her underneath a different waterfall that's like more powerful that I might share. And then I shared some stuff from Kara, because she actually went to Niagara Falls in the summer and made like a nice Instagram story about it. So I shared that.

And then Nadine also, she lives in Canada, but they've been to the falls a lot and they really like it. So, thank you to do there. We chase waterfalls and nothing bad happened. Yeah, I think it. Oh, and everyone wanted us to know that the glaciers melts and that goes into the Great Lakes and then that creates Niagara Falls. That's where the water camps comes from.

That's how much they melt? I don't understand that. How can it melt? Also, like, snow melts too, but like, you know, it's happening like all year round. because like even here in the desert we have some mountains that have snow through like May when it's like in the 90s but I can see a mountain with snow on it still

you know seriously not next to me but it's like higher like there's a there's this hike that my friend Don might do when it's from downtown Palm Springs to the top of whatever mountain that is where like there's in Palm Springs there's a like a gondola like in the air that takes you up to the top of this mountain

but the hike is like like the elevation goes from like zero to 10,000 on the hike. And it's like one of like the hardest hikes in America. And, but by the time you get to the top, you're cold. You know, like you start in Palm Springs where you're hot. I'm trying to get to the top. You're cold. It's like, but it's still a snowy up there.

We can make it the 50 degree club. It's true. But I'll take, let's you take the, we'll take the tram. Yes. And like wave at the people who are walking up. Um, well, thanks for writing in telling us your stories. we love hearing from you so do more of that at doom to fail pod at gmail.com or on the socials doomed to fail pod tell your friends

see soon oh also let us know if we were in your rapt of like Spotify or mine pocketcasts or listen to stuff thank you daniel please tell us yes got a shout out daniel thank you for sharing that we were in your top five spotify and if you send me daniel's um address i'll send him a sticker that's part of If you let us know that you're wearing your top, we will send you a sticker. And I will mail it to you whenever. And also, as far as I really think that inside Spotify, there is a way for you to see our creator stats. Did I set that up?

I don't know. We'll talk about it later. But like I really feel like you have access to stuff because I see other podcasts being like, Spotify says we have this much growth this year. And we release this number of episodes. And I'm like, it has to be in there. Right. I am going to Google around. Cool. Cool. Well, thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thanks all.